A Death in Wichita (32 page)

With my own courtroom vigil now over and the sun attempting to break through the clouds on Friday afternoon, I turned away from the courthouse and began walking in the snow back to my downtown hotel, my final image of the event being Randall Terry standing outside in the bitter cold hunting for one more reporter to speak to. I was eager to be alone with my thoughts and to feel the peculiar emptiness that comes at the end of a murder trial, especially one that had generated this much anticipation and attention. The media would move on to a new story, the Sedgwick County Courthouse would become less crowded, and the bomb-sniffing dogs would be given another mission at another venue, but this verdict signified a larger ending than that. The life and death of Dr. Tiller had not concluded until the jury had heard the facts of the case and reached its own judgment about Scott Roeder.

The national abortion wars would continue, but for thirty-five years they’d been centered in Wichita, on a street corner in a modest-looking neighborhood, around one figure who’d never given an inch to those who hated him the most. Kansas had once again played a crucial role in a divided America, but the battle would have to find a new focal point and other targets in other places, because there was no one left in Wichita to demonstrate against. The streets felt emptier than ever, but the pain and uncertainty were still in the air. Things had ended, but nothing had been resolved.

Nineteen days after the verdict, on February 17, Joseph Stack of Texas sent his own anti-government message by flying a small plane into a federal building in Austin to protest the IRS and the tax laws of America. Before setting his house on fire, loading his plane with an extra gas tank, and slamming it into a structure holding IRS offices, killing the tax employee Vernon Hunter and Stack himself, he’d posted an online manifesto.

“I would only hope,” he wrote, “that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.”

His suicide mission generated numerous supporters in cyberspace, including Facebook groups such as “The Philosophy of Joe Stack,” which quickly had two thousand fans. Tributes to the dead man showed up on Web sites and then came a video game challenging players to burn down a house and fly a plane into a building.

Two weeks later, on March 4, John Patrick Bedell of California opened fire at an entrance to the Pentagon, wounding two police officers before he was fatally gunned down. Bedell had been diagnosed as bipolar and been in and out of treatment programs for years. His parents reported him missing on January 4, one day after a Texas Highway Patrol officer stopped him for speeding in Texarkana. He returned to his parents’ home, but the next time he went missing he showed up with a 9-millimeter pistol in D.C. and began shooting outside the Pentagon.

As spring approached, with President Obama’s health care reform on hold and tragedies such as those in Austin and Washington dominating the news, the United States struck more people than Joseph Stack or John Patrick Bedell as not merely unmanageable, but ungovernable. According to a Pew Research poll conducted March 11–21, 2010, trust in the U.S. government had reached an all-time low. Only about one in five registered voters believed they could rely on the federal government to do the right thing “just about always” or most of the time, while an overwhelming majority said it will do the right thing only some of the time—or never. The survey attributed this negative view to a “perfect storm of conditions associated with distrust of government—a dismal economy, an unhappy public, bitter partisan-based backlash, and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials.”

Heading back to Denver following the trial, I recalled the previous June, two weeks after Dr. Tiller had been murdered, when I’d visited my hometown. The summer heat had only begun to gather on the plains and build up throughout the long hours before dusk brought some relief. One sweltering afternoon I’d walked over to the small swimming pool near my old school—a form of recreation and escape from the scorching air that hadn’t existed in the community when I was a child. Standing outside the pool and looking in through a chain-link fence, I hoped that the water could steer local teens away from the drinking and drugs so rampant when I was their age. Watching the boys and girls swim, I saw a black youngster, maybe ten or eleven, paddling un-self-consciously next to the white children, all of them splashing around in the sunlight, grabbing each other’s arms and legs and laughing in the high-pitched squeals of kids everywhere having fun in a pool on a hot summer day.

When I was ten or eleven black people had been banned inside the city limits of our town after sundown. In those years, tens of millions of Americans had railed against integration, declaring that it would destroy the country and erode our democratic foundations. The mixing of the races was unnatural and against what God had intended—it would undermine the fabric of society and leave the United States vulnerable at home and abroad. Seeing beads of water slide off the black youngster’s shoulders and onto the skin of the white children beside him, I felt a knot rise in my throat and I lowered my head, turning away from the pool and continuing my walk. America had proven itself more resilient and flexible than some had ever imagined. The center had held during the Civil War, during integration, and again during the controversy surrounding the death of George Tiller. The country wasn’t yet finished with its evolving and its becoming, and something
was
about to be resolved through the processes of government.

On Saturday, March 20, 2010, thousands of opponents of President Obama’s health care legislation encircled the Capitol in Washington, waving signs and chanting, “Kill the bill!” They threw racial slurs at three black Democratic lawmakers—Representatives André Carson of Indiana, Emanuel Cleaver II of Missouri, and John Lewis of Georgia—and a protester spat at Cleaver as the trio walked toward the Capitol for a vote. Other demonstrators hurled anti-homosexual remarks at Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, who’s openly gay. The man who spat at Congressman Cleaver was arrested, but Cleaver decided not to press charges.

The legislator’s office then released this statement:

“This is not the first time the Congressman has been called the ‘n’ word and certainly not the worst assault he has endured in his years fighting for equal rights for all Americans. That being said, he is disappointed that in the 21st century our national discourse has devolved to the point of name calling and spitting. He looks forward to taking a historic vote on health care reform legislation tomorrow…Our nation has a history of struggling each time we expand rights. Today’s protests are no different, but the Congressman believes this is worth fighting for.”

At eleven o’clock the following night, the House was finally ready to vote on the measure, which offered policies to tens of millions of uninsured Americans, covered others who had pre-existing medical conditions, and lowered the cost of drugs for senior citizens. The vote came after a compromise had been reached on the most difficult issue surrounding the new bill: President Obama had agreed to sign an executive order affirming that the legislation would prevent any federal monies from being used for abortions. Representative Bart Stupak of Michigan, who’d vehemently opposed the reform bill last November, was satisfied with the order and decided to support the president.

“Make no doubt about it,” Stupak said that Sunday evening. “There will be no public funds for abortion.”

During Stupak’s speech on the House floor leading up to the vote, Representative Randy Neugebauer, a third-term Texas Republican, cried out “baby killer.”

Congress approved health care reform by a vote of 219–212 and the president signed the legislation into law two days later. At least ten Democrats who’d voted for the bill, including Stupak, had their offices vandalized or received death threats.

Between January and June 2010, eleven states passed laws regulating or restricting abortion, while four other states put forth similar bills that had made it through at least one legislative house. Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi signed a bill barring insurers from covering abortion under the new health care reform act, and the Oklahoma legislature overrode a gubernatorial veto of a bill requiring abortion doctors to answer thirty-eight questions about each procedure. Thirteen other states had now introduced or passed similar legislation.

On April 1, 2010, Judge Wilbert held a sentencing hearing for the convicted man, the last opportunity for Roeder to address the court, the media covering the event, and the national viewing public. The proceeding, which many expected to take an hour or two, ran from nine a.m. until six p.m. before the judge exhaustedly brought it to a conclusion. At one point, he threatened to toss Roeder from the courtroom for the killer’s outbursts against the legal system that had tried and found him guilty. The only issue before the judge was whether he’d make Roeder eligible for parole after serving twenty-five years or give him the Hard 50 and prevent the fifty-two-year-old from coming before the Kansas parole board for half a century—a certain life sentence. The prosecution, led by Nola Foulston and Ann Swegle, and the Tiller family, represented by their attorney Lee Thompson, both delivered statements that echoed each other. Their words were clearly intended to place the murder in a larger context by repeatedly using the terms “hate crime,” “domestic terrorism,” “anarchist,” and “political assassination.”

“The impact of this crime,” said Thompson, “is felt on the medical profession far beyond Wichita. He [Dr. Tiller] gave his life for the rights of women…His legacy cannot be diminished by the act of a single terrorist.”

Stalking was one of the aggravating factors in ruling on the Hard 50 sentence, and Foulston emphasized just how long Roeder had tracked the physician before murdering him. He’d first gone to Reformation Lutheran Church in 2002 to develop a strategy to kill the man at his place of worship.

The defense presented four character witnesses, including Eugene Frye, Dave Leach, and Regina Dinwiddie, who testified about how religiously committed and well mannered Roeder had been around them. The psychologist George Hough, who’d examined the defendant for ten hours in the summer of 2009, told the court that Roeder had chosen to obey God’s laws, not man’s, but he was mentally competent to stand trial.

The judge spoke at length for the first time since the case had started and part of his decision today depended on whether he felt that this crime was especially “heinous, atrocious, and cruel.” Roeder’s actions fell into that category, Wilbert said, because he’d shot Dr. Tiller not at his home or office or even in the parking lot of Reformation Lutheran but inside the church itself—designed to provide “asylum or sanctuary in our society…the very place that abhors violence.”

In late afternoon, Roeder himself addressed the court and read extensively from the writings of Paul Hill, who’d killed Dr. John Britton and James Barrett in July 1994. As most everyone who’d spoken with Roeder had discovered, he could appear quite normal for the first ten minutes or so of a conversation, but then his fanaticism over abortion surfaced, along with his rage against government, a feeling that was spreading across America. Four days before the hearing, a federal grand jury in Detroit had indicted nine suspected members of a Christian militia group, the Hutaree, and charged them with plotting to kill local, state, and national law enforcement officials. Three days later, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security warned that another outfit, the Guardians of the Free Republics, wanted to “restore America” by dismantling parts of the government. They’d sent more than thirty governors letters saying that if they didn’t leave office within three days, they’d be “removed.”

“How is it,” Roeder asked the judge, while complaining about his treatment since his arrest, “that a man can speak openly and freely at his sentencing, but not at his trial? This court stifled my testimony…The blame for George Tiller’s death lies more with the state of Kansas than with me. You may sentence me to twenty-five or fifty years in prison but it does not serve justice in any way…I agree with Paul Hill wholeheartedly. God will avenge every drop of blood that stains Kansas grass…Give me liberty to defend the unborn or give me death.”

For more than half an hour, the judge let him ramble without interruption, until he began attacking the district attorney, sitting a few feet from Roeder. Then Wilbert stepped in.

“You killed Dr. Tiller,” he said. “You’re not going to politically assassinate Nola Foulston. I’m going to draw the line there.”

Roeder was undeterred.

“If you would follow a higher power,” he told the judge, “you would acquit me.”

“If you think,” Wilbert replied, “you’re going to convince me with some last-minute plea, you’re wasting your time…I’m not going to provide you with an all-night political forum.”

After forty-five minutes of listening to Roeder speechify, the judge delivered his ruling, giving the killer fifty years plus two more for threatening Gary Hoepner and Keith Martin at the church on the day of the murder.

The proceeding was finished, but not Scott Roeder.

As he was being ushered out of the courtroom by the beefy guards for the final time, he tried to turn back toward the prosecutors’ table, but was restrained.

“The blood of babies,” he yelled, “is on your hands, Nola Foulston and Ann Swegle!”

Later, outside the courthouse, the DA summed up her experience by saying, “This was a difficult case [and] the difficulty was apparent from the emotion that rang across the courtroom…across our community, and across the world.” A few weeks later, as the one-year anniversary of the murder approached, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, spoke about the physician on the floor of Congress: “He was murdered by an unrepentant assassin who took a life in the name of protecting life. It was an indefensible crime and an incomprehensible excuse.”